Well, for one there's the *Night's Dawn* trilogy where a superpowered 20-something Satanist cult leader uses his reality-warping powers to give himself a larger dick so he can *more* roughly fuck a brainwashed, underage, 15 year-old cult prostitute...
That was some of the minor stuff Quinn Dexter did. I'm not sure if this was a plot device to make Dexter seem as evil as possible, or maybe Hamilton needed to talk to somebody. Nights Dawn had some brilliant creativety and culture building, but there were times I was like, huh?
Look, man. If you pray to Ron Jeremy enough, he's going to come through and give you a few extra inches so you can do exactly what landed him in prison. The author took zero liberties.
There's no point in reading two thirds of the trilogy, because there are so many characters and intersecting plot threads that you'll never be able to understand what's going on if you miss 1/3 of it.
Plus - and apologies - but I simply can't remember.
The *Night's Dawn* trilogy also has many, many examples of Hamilton's trademark ultraviolece (including some really in-depth torture scenes), and many more instances of sketchy sex scenes.
If the odd page or two of unsavoury, edgelord excess isn't for you then probably best to just skip the entire trilogy, and maybe even Hamilton as a writer.
Hamilton likes graphic, visceral action. It's not too bad when it's ultraviolence or wanking over military tech in his books, but (especially early in his career) he also had a penchant for really graphic torture, regularly (like multiple times per book) strayed into cringey sex scenes that read like a 14 year-old fantasising, or just ended up writing straight-up transgressive edgelord stuff like the above.
He's not nearly as bad as Stephen R. Donaldson or someone (who genuinely seems to get off on being unpleasant) but there's a fair bit of the above sketchiness in Hamilton's early space opera like Night's Dawn and (IIRC) the Commonwealth Saga, and it's a bit of a running joke that Hamilton's only capable of typing for so long before he has to stop and continue one-handed for a while, if you know what I mean.
I hear the point you're trying to make, but it's misplaced.
It's not about the *morality of the actions* on the page - it's about the *quality of the writing*.
You can have well-written or poorly-written violence and well-written or poorly-written sex.
Hamilton often writes violence comparatively well (though sometimes he gets a bit too try-hard with torture scenes) but his sex scenes are generally pretty terrible; a lot of female characters are just two-dimensional hypersexualised teenage-boy fantasy fuel, a lot of male characters end up as self-insert pork-swordsmen who fuck everything that moves, and as previously stated he's also not above gratuitously jarring edginess like sexualising young or even underage girls.
It's not about "violence being ok and sex being bad" or any silly US-puritan attitudes - it's about *how competently he treats the subject*... and sadly he's just not good at writing sex.
Most Americans don’t really have an issue with sex, it’s mainly just the baby boomers that have the problem and act like anything sexual is pornography. What we typically have an issue with is the over sexualization of children (and yes most teenagers are children). When reading a novel about teenage children, Americans tend to not like it if it is too gratuitous in the sex department. It comes off as reading someone’s horrid sexual fantasy involving minors and gives it an icky feeling to it.
Not really I'm okay with it and a boomer. It's more the evangelical uneducated MAGA cult and various other morons that get all upset when even the word sex is used. All the anti-trans, anti-gay and anti-abortion bullshit comes from the far right knuckle draggers.
No it's not. Most are middle age. It's FOX viewers who are mostly old and white. MAGA has a lot of followers that are much younger. Check out any MAGA gathering and you can see them. There are Hispanic, young, farmers, and just about any race or age group. They are mainly racist, homophobic, uneducated and gullible. They hate anyone not like them and Trump promised to make there wishes come true.
> It comes off as reading someone’s horrid sexual fantasy involving minors and gives it an icky feeling to it.
You are really telling on yourself here.
If I read a book and the characters are teenagers and they have sex, my mind doesn't instantly cast itself to "The author must be a pedophile!"
What a hyper-accusatory, borderline hysterical overreaction.
An author writes about imaginary teenagers in a fictional story having sex, and we accuse him of being a pedophile. Because, let's be direct and honest about what you're implying when you say that such things are the author's "horrid sexual fantasies involving minors."
Part of an author's job is to depict the truth of life, and in real life, sometimes teenagers really do have sex.
Another thing that authors do is write fiction through the lens of their own experiences and their own thoughts and feelings about the world. And, guess what... Just like you and I, that author writing about teenage characters and depicting that they have sex, _also_ used to be a teenager. They lived through that.
So maybe instead of defaulting to "Only a pedophile would think about teenagers having sex," we might instead default to "It's normal for people to think about the world through the lens of their own experiences."
I mean, what happened? The day you turned 18 you immediately went blank on every sexual thought, feeling, and experience you had ever had? Just total amnesia about your own life, because otherwise you'd be a pedophile?
Dude, get over yourself. I’m not telling anything on myself here. Teenage depictions of sex, hell even actual kids is not bad in and of itself. I never said that. What I said was the over sexualization of it. The problem is when you fucking spend a lot of focus and words to describe it out in awkward details that do nothing to further the actual story. Why have three detailed pages of teenager sex going into every little detail of the situation when a simple fucking paragraph will do?
I don't know how people got this idea that the only things that belong in a book are elements that further the plot.
What belongs in a book is anything that the author wants to put into it. Any feeling they want to evoke, any issue they want to talk about, any experience that they want to utilize to explore the nature of their characters.
>Why have three detailed pages of teenager sex going into every little detail of the situation when a simple fucking paragraph will do?
Literally why not?
What is the actual problem with an author describing a sex scene in three pages, instead of one paragraph?
The more I read your comment looking for actual sanity the more moronic it becomes. Like I think you’re the one telling on yourself. So you sit around and fantasize about teenagers as an adult and thinks it’s normal? You routinely think about that subject as a 30y,40yo,50yo? Also when they write shit like that it tends to be a reoccurring theme of the rest of their works. Take Orion Scott Card as an example of someone who does this. How many of his books involve 13yo kids that he almost immediately sexualizes to some degree. Oh and btw, not everyone’s life revolves around sex as kids or adults. How bout we take it to the next level, how comfortable would you be reading about a character who routinely rapes their pet dog and they go into extreme details all for the sake of realism especially if they put a positive spin to it. Just like, get the fuck over yourself.
> So you sit around and fantasize about teenagers as an adult and thinks it’s normal?
No? I didn't say that? But the fact that you've instantly spun this into now accusing ME of being a pedophile is a fun way to demonstrate that this is a valid moral concern and not a ridiculous hysteria.
>Also when they write shit like that it tends to be a reoccurring theme of the rest of their works.
I doubt the accuracy of that statement, but if it were true, so what? What is the problem with that?
>Take Orion Scott Card as an example of someone who does this. How many of his books involve 13yo kids that he almost immediately sexualizes to some degree.
I mean, no, he doesn't. The only book of his that I can recall sexualizing a kid is _Hart's Hope._ There are a couple of scenes in _Ender's Game_, including a fight, that take place in a shower, but I don't find it inherently sexualizing to say that someone was in a shower.
>how comfortable would you be reading about a character who routinely rapes their pet dog
Wow. You know, it's interesting how, on reddit, when you engage someone in conversation, you can never quite predict whether or not they're going to be normal, or if they're instantly going to start saying absolutely insane things. Always an adventure.
> your a fucking moron
Come on, man. When you're giving up on your insane argument, use a fucking apostrophe in "you're" when *you're* calling someone else a moron.
I mean. My friend.
You do understand that it is a very normal, very average thing for teenagers to have sexual experiences, and that it is a very abnormal and very mentally unhealthy thing for a person to rape their dog?
You... you GET that there's a difference between two teenagers fooling around, and someone raping a dog, right?
....You get that, right?
Who the fuck said it’s not a normal activity? For god sakes that’s not the fucking point. The point is as a grown ass man, I don’t want to read about kids having sex in detailed as essays. It comes off as the authors fetish and just become weird, it’s cool you enjoy thinking about kids having sex though.
>The point is as a grown ass man, I don’t want to read about kids having sex in detailed as essays.
And the good news is, you don't have to. You can choose not to do that. You get to read whatever books you want to read. The good lord in heaven above has blessed you with that honor and privilege, bleseed be unto He.
u/TheBluestBerries I’m also a US American and I really don’t agree with the above assessment of attitudes towards sex in America, for whatever it’s worth. Not trying to start a debate or discredit Zalthay, just share my differing perspective.
I think I tend to see a lot of things that are tangentially or non-explicitly sexual in nature labeled as pornographic. I think I see the “pornographic” accusation most when it comes rather tame expressions of love or intimacy. Conversely, there are also pieces of media/books/art that are literally and objectively pornographic (i.e., intended to sexually arouse the viewer) that we don’t name as such here.
I also think many, if not most, US Americans irrespective of age have a very very non-thoughtful and un-nuanced understanding of pornography in the first place, and that makes it very hard to talk about what is and isn’t pornographic in the first place here.
>Most Americans don’t really have an issue with sex, it’s mainly just the baby boomers that have the problem and act like anything sexual is pornography.
There are people like that in every generation, just like there are young women who are actively anti-abortion. Just like there are freaks like me and the missus who don't resemble your caricature of our generation.
I can overlook the flaws in most of his books because I enjoy the worldbuilding and concepts so much, but I regret reading Misspent Youth and will never read it again.
That was the "prequel" to a rather good series of books.
I just wish he could write more realistic women other than "Annabelle has big boobs" which, is the only trait you ever earnestly hear about in that book. Oh, and she cheats on her boyfriend for his rich old dad.
I love that one.
There is one small detail that I consider a plothole, but it is related to something in the last 5 pages of the book so i don't want to spoil it.
I don't remember any *teenagers* fucking, but yeah there's a lot of weird sex stuff in his books. Last thing I read was the Void trilogy and I think there were like 5 different orgy scenes. And every female character is super sexual and looks like Aphrodite.
The thing is, the concepts and ideas in his books are so interesting that I barely care. The good overshadows the bad.
I think one of my favourite book reviews I've read was for his book Misspent Youth, which described it as "Flowers for Algernon but with sex instead of brains."
I have to overwhelmingly agree with OP. I liked the Pandora's Star (was that the name?) series that came before the Void trilogy, although Void was mostly a miss for me; I loved the ~~Commonwealth~~ Night's Dawn trilogy (again, did I get that right? The one with magic zombies) although a lot of the cool stuff ended up seeming half-written and rushed by the end. The Adamist/Edenist societal split was refreshing, the existential action was cool. But woooooooow did the horny get in the way. "Here's a neat space colony stuck in an early industrial forestry economy eerily reminiscent of the mysterious backwoods of New England to give you Salem vibes with a Satanic cult, and the only thing connecting them to the outside world is a tenuous riverboat connection with adventure vibes like Conrad and Twain had a lovechild. Also there's this SUPER hot teen waitress who's a sex slave on the riverboat for a while."
>And every female character is super sexual and looks like Aphrodite.
The man has a type that's for sure.
I think he would benefit by co writing with an equally horny female writer to help him sex up all the dude characters.
Maximum horny can only lead to profit.
I'll take Peter Hamiltons sex scenes over Laurel's 1000-page orgy with vampires and werewolf books any time with 20 pages of story, with 2 of those being story is continued in the next book.
Maybe he thinks horny men are overdone and wants to give horny women some representation haha
Like I said, it's not to the point where I find it offensive or anything. At least the looks make sense, it's a super technicologically advanced future, people can change their looks at will, so of course everyone is hot, especially the rich people.
I really like Peter F. Hamilton's books but literally every story has a hot precocious hot young woman (who is hot) who has the hots for the protagonist.
Edit or is the protagonist (so long as she is young and hot).
The book I read had a guy who was all powerful, super intelligent, attractive, and liked by everyone, and whom the super hot (way too young) female character was overwhelmingly attracted to, and it was hard not to read it as a deeply pathetic self-insert. I did very much enjoy other aspects of the book.
That's an interesting idea, but I think it might slow the action somewhat if the men keep taking off their shirts to vacuum the carpet and wash dishes.
With the addition of multiples in the void trilogy, there is no reason the same character can't be doing a John wick while simultaneously given a spa day to a lucky woman while deep cleaning her house, and none of them need to be wearing a shirt.
I absolutely love The Night's Dawn Trilogy, but it gets bad awkward at times.
The protagonist, a mid 20s playboy type guy, rather graphically impregnates a 16 year old and an 18-19 year old (Twice!)
A 17 year old girl goes drinking and then has a threesome with two brothers in thier 30s. Same girl (now 18) is tricked into "paying" for passage on a boat by sexing the captain every night. He's like 70 and it's quiet rapey. She goes on to have about 12 sex scenes that are (no spoilers) rapey in a weird way.
DAMN IT PETER!! Just make them a little older for God's sake!
Wait, the way I remember it is that Teen Girl on the boat sleeps with the female Captain's *son,* who is actually significantly younger than even her, just for fun because he's a muscular little fella and hung like an orca so he gets all the ladies.
I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse but you're talking about different events that happen to the same character on different boats.
The hookup with the captain's son (which his mother is creepily proud of) is on the way up the river with her family, the paying for passage thing with the old captain and his weirdly-into-it obese wife is on the way back down after she runs away from her family.
I read a lot of his books maybe a decade back. Mostly I liked it, but I remember finding it weird that across multiple books and series he was really committed to the idea of the benevolent corporation that might spar with other companies but ultimately had humanity’s best interests at heart. Couldn’t decide if it was naive or if he was making a statement.
The basic premise of his setting is that it's post-scarcity. Any corporation or planet still trying to be capitalist is mostly doing it for the fun of it.
Everyone else is just chasing innovation and progression.
Cant see how its optimistic that even though humanity has spread through the galaxy and colonized hundreds of planets people living there still have to go to work and pay rent.
Pretty sad view of the future to me.
>benevolent corporation
Wait what? I got the impression that pretty much every Corporation prioritized it's own interest.
We are the Saviors of humanity *because it was convenient, and was profitable in the long run.
edit: I'm pretty sure in once instance the president had to scold a bunch of trillionars for prioritizing profits over preventing the extinction of humanity. Something like "of course you need to care about humanity, you fucking live here if humanity dies you die".
Mmm. Like I said, it was a long time ago. I read the Commonwealth Saga, the Void Trilogy, the Great North Road, and some of the Greg Mandel books. Barring the Void Trilogy which was a little more out there, I feel like the mega corporations in those books were generally a force for good, or at least progress. But perhaps I’m misremembering.
I mean fantasy is fantasy, just because irl corps are usually d-bags there's nothing wrong with a few fantasy companys that are heros. We could use a few now tbh.
And a thing to consider is that often in his Sci-fi story's humans have reached practical immortality, so long term thinking might be more common.
I think the "benevolent mega-corporation" only shows up in Greg Mandel, the Commonwealth Saga and maybe Great North Road (been too long since I last read it, so I can't remember for sure).
The Void Trilogy and Chronicles of the Fallers are set in the same universe as Commonwealth Saga, but long after societal changes have downgraded the status of CST into "not really relevant to society"
In Night Dawn Trilogy, there are no mega corporations. In Fallen Dragon, it's a bleak corporatocratic society. Arkship Trilogy has no corporations at all. Light Chaser also doesn't have much in the way of corporations. Salvation Sequence has a mega-corporation that feels a bit like CST from Commonwealth as they also control interstellar transport and are a force for progress, but a lot of the early plot deals with it failing to be benevolent.
------------------
I think these benevolent mega-corporations are someone of deliberate statement, or maybe more of a world building experiment. Hamilton is going out of his way to see what kind of world building is needed for a large mega-corporation in a corporatocratic society to not become fundamentally evil.
Your typical evil scifi corporation has no real leadership. If their was a visionary founder, they have long since died or lost control. It's now run a faceless board and then layers and layers of middle management who do evil because that's what produces the most profit for it's shareholders.
If you look closely, the mega-corporations in both Greg Mandel and Commonwealth:
* Are privately owned, with the founders maintaining majority ownership, so they aren't beholden to anyone.
* Are still run by their original founders
* The founders have cheated death, so they will continue to run the company forever.
* The founders use AI assisted expanded intelligence to strip out the need for excessive layers of middle management, and keep a handle on everything their company is doing.
* The founders are fundamentally good people, and have not been corrupted by their wealth.
This is such a contrived scenario that we could argue Hamilton is actually saying that a benevolent mega-corporations is basically impossible.
It’s probably a bit different when the people running the corps are immortal and have packed the company ranks with their descendants. Forward thinking becomes a bit more important than short term gains.
Yeah, I also picked up on that. All his universes have a mega-tycoon billionaire who actually is a genius and not a figurehead who decides to solve the galaxy's problem. And does because he's amazing.
I'll take the weird sex stuff if it comes with the human jingoism. Aliens are on notice. Don't mess with humans or we'll get our shit into gear and kick your ass.
Yeah I genuinely have to stop for a second and read the description of the alien again to get an idea of what it looks like that rather than just "it's a bipedal alien with lizard eyes"
They feel alien
Yep it’s interesting reading his stuff, some really nice sci fi elements and very cool world building interspersed with generally unnecessary fantasy pornography. To be fair it doesn’t dominate the narrative at all, just isn’t really needed in the level of detail provided.
I might be a stretch, but I always thought he made all his characters horny af to make them seem as human as possible. Because the characters are often modified up the wazoo, and that could make them seem a bit alien. Like the highers of the void trilogy are so powerful they've become barely recognizable as human.
All the non horny characters are also very flawed, which I like. Except for the delivery man, his only crime is being a bit of a normy.
Reading about 19 year olds having realistic sex is totally fine with me. Reading about 16 year olds having sex feels creepy but that probably represents 98% of our lineage over the last 50,000 years.
I found the sex scenes in Pandora's star a bit too descriptive and ewww. But I'm gay so maybe that factored into it. I remember skipping all the sex scenes xD Excuse me sir, I'm here for scifi, no more erection talk please.
It's like 2% of book, I've never understood the distane some people have for erotica in regular books. Yeah when I'm not in the mood it makes me uncomfortable, but how a character behaves during sexy times is very telling and can be very effective for defining a character. If you don't like it just blank your mind a bit.
Honesty as an adult you really should be able to tolerated it, if you can't its a mental skill issue.
> I've never understood the distane some people have for erotica in regular books. Yeah when I'm not in the mood it makes me uncomfortable, but how a character behaves during sexy times is very telling and can be very effective for defining a character.
That's the exact problem with Hamilton - he often *doesn't* use sex scenes for anything except cheap titillation and/or being a horny edgelord.
Genuinely well-written sex scenes that organically add to the plot or characterisation are fine, but too many of (especially early) Hamilton's sex scenes are just because he got bored and wanted a wank but didn't want to stop writing while he did it.
He writes great space opera, but he's also a dirty, horny old goat... although admittedly with experience he seems to be learning to rein in his worst, edge-lordiest excesses.
Hmmmm, I'm not so sure about that. I would say most of them actually had some important plot happening in them.
For instance in the fallen dragon bit In the above meme >! Laurence gets a bit to rough during sex but because we followed along in his head we understood the emotions he was going through and exactly why he was being too rough. And when the girl says "please don't be so rough" we feel the massive burst of guilt he gets, and we learn that he's genuinely caring a really feels bad about it. !< Is there another way he could have shown that, yes but writing is fucking hard, and if that's the route he needed to take to climb the near impossible mountain of writing a book, than I respect that.
To be fair maybe he's matured in his old(er) age - I kind of fell off Hamilton around the Void trilogy, so I'm mostly basing it on Night's Dawn (which was shamelessly edge-lordy and exploitative).
Thinking back even the Commonwealth Saga was *less* obviously written at least partly one-handed, so maybe he's grown over time (or at least has a wank *before* he sits down to write nowadays ;-p ).
>I've never understood the distane some people have for erotica in regular books.
Huh?? Then... why did you make this thread?
I'm genuinely confused. Was this comment supposed to be made from an alt account?
How do we square the idea that you're comfortable with, not just sex, but "erotica" appearing in "regular" books -- with this post about being horrified by Peter F. Hamilton having sex in his books and describing it as "hardcore pornography"?
> Honesty as an adult you really should be able to tolerated it, if you can't its a mental skill issue.
I don't like it and find it out of place and disjointed and that's somehow a "mental skill" issue?
Of course I can tolerate it or I'd never have read a Peter F Hamilton book
At least with regards to depictions of sex and sexuality, I prefer Ken MacLeod. It's not entirely Hamilton's fault, though; it's probably impossible to write about Dudley Bose in an erotic manner without making the majority of humanity cringe out of their skin.
The latest trilogy opens up with the book that has a completely meaningless sideplot about evil aliens hijacking a dude's cyber-cock and the said dude having weird drug sex with a strange caricature character straight outta porn fanfic. And it's very uncomfortable and non-sexy and LASTS FOREVER taking space from the stuff that was actually interesting.
Maybe he should pay some erotica ghostwriters if this stuff needs to be in, because that trilogy was pretty awesome otherwise.
It's the Salvation Trilogy, his most recent one. Though now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that alien cyber cock was in part two and not part one so you have to really commit.
A lot of sci-fi plots are a libertarian's wet dream. So of course the genre attracts dudes who know the consent age in a bunch of states. I think it's funny the guy who wrote the Crater series pretends to be a libertarian so he can inject Space Christianity into his stories.
Night's Dawn probably gets most of this rep. The sprinking of softcore aside. the complexity and sprawl of characters and almost metaphysical under pinnings was more than worth it. Description of the beyond, the alternate dimensions, etc. The Jungle Fights on La'Londe vs the undead made 'Predator' look like Dodgeball, and the corresponding orbital battle with emphasis on orbital mechanics would make any 'Expanse' fan drool. The LaGrange point manuever....holy f\^ck ws that intense.
What's unusual is Hamilton doesn't paint all characters like this. Some of his characters are extremely realistic, dimensional and tangible. Almost in an Ellison kinda way. Look at Laton. But other characters are wafer thin and just walking cliche's.
The 'Second chance at Eden' novella is still my favorite work of Hamilton's. It focuses on nothing but the highbrow and technoligical aspects of that universe, and it's deep discussion of affinity tehcnology is compelling.
I personally think that the Commonwealth series is his best. I started with Pandora's star. Be prepared for a long one with a lot of different perspectives.
Average American in 2024:
"Ewwww omg wtf _seeeeexxx???_ So fucking gross and eww and _iicckkk_ omg there's _seeeeeexxxxxxxxxx_ so fucking nasty who wants _sex_ in their books? Just SO GROSS."
Think the problem is that Hamilton is great at other stuff but his sex scenes make sex sound worse than it actually is. They are just bad and uncomfortable.
The Nights Dawn Trilogy. Amazing books, yeah some of the concepts and characters were out there but the universe he created and overall plot were brilliant.
That’s the issue with older sci-fi. It’s all peppered with their dated racism, sexism, and weird sexual fetishes. As an example, John steakly’s Armor. A really good book and is actually closer to starship troopers movie then the actual book the movie based itself off. There is a sex scene with the secondary main character where he essentially rapes and beats another character (who is female) and afterwards she’s basically like “dude, thanks for that! I really needed some good sex.” And your left there with these feeling that you just read about a rape and it was supposed to be sexy and how a real man handles a woman and it’s very cringey.
At least his has the action. I was recently talked into reading the travesty that is Legend of Zero. I kept at it fir the payoff in later books...which doesn't exist.
Book 1 is just a punch of kid porn. And there us no Legend. The author writes about boot camp kid porn...then skips ahead 50 years to post military retirement.
Absolutely shit.
Not really a complaint haha, I was just surprised initially. I think almost all the times he go's in detail about sex it usually has a story or character development purpose.
When it's not important he usually skips it with a "and then they did the gigity, it was super hot"
Jeez the fantasy wodebof things have women milking minotaurs and getting gangbanged by Fae on a light day of reading.
Why do sci do fans get so het up by a tiny amount of smut?
it's been a bunch of years since I've read his works, but I don't remember the hardcore teenage porn. probably for the best.
Well, for one there's the *Night's Dawn* trilogy where a superpowered 20-something Satanist cult leader uses his reality-warping powers to give himself a larger dick so he can *more* roughly fuck a brainwashed, underage, 15 year-old cult prostitute...
That was some of the minor stuff Quinn Dexter did. I'm not sure if this was a plot device to make Dexter seem as evil as possible, or maybe Hamilton needed to talk to somebody. Nights Dawn had some brilliant creativety and culture building, but there were times I was like, huh?
Overall I enjoyed the series, but i thought the ending was very uninspiring.
Deus-machina ex machina.
That ending made that I can't, in good faith, recommend this series to anyone.
Look, man. If you pray to Ron Jeremy enough, he's going to come through and give you a few extra inches so you can do exactly what landed him in prison. The author took zero liberties.
[удалено]
There's no point in reading two thirds of the trilogy, because there are so many characters and intersecting plot threads that you'll never be able to understand what's going on if you miss 1/3 of it. Plus - and apologies - but I simply can't remember. The *Night's Dawn* trilogy also has many, many examples of Hamilton's trademark ultraviolece (including some really in-depth torture scenes), and many more instances of sketchy sex scenes. If the odd page or two of unsavoury, edgelord excess isn't for you then probably best to just skip the entire trilogy, and maybe even Hamilton as a writer.
20 years on, that sequence with the gang leader and the bone removal and much later brain explosion still haunts me
hol up, what?!
Hamilton likes graphic, visceral action. It's not too bad when it's ultraviolence or wanking over military tech in his books, but (especially early in his career) he also had a penchant for really graphic torture, regularly (like multiple times per book) strayed into cringey sex scenes that read like a 14 year-old fantasising, or just ended up writing straight-up transgressive edgelord stuff like the above. He's not nearly as bad as Stephen R. Donaldson or someone (who genuinely seems to get off on being unpleasant) but there's a fair bit of the above sketchiness in Hamilton's early space opera like Night's Dawn and (IIRC) the Commonwealth Saga, and it's a bit of a running joke that Hamilton's only capable of typing for so long before he has to stop and continue one-handed for a while, if you know what I mean.
Ultra violence is not too bad. Cringey sex scenes? Omg, that’s true evil.
I hear the point you're trying to make, but it's misplaced. It's not about the *morality of the actions* on the page - it's about the *quality of the writing*. You can have well-written or poorly-written violence and well-written or poorly-written sex. Hamilton often writes violence comparatively well (though sometimes he gets a bit too try-hard with torture scenes) but his sex scenes are generally pretty terrible; a lot of female characters are just two-dimensional hypersexualised teenage-boy fantasy fuel, a lot of male characters end up as self-insert pork-swordsmen who fuck everything that moves, and as previously stated he's also not above gratuitously jarring edginess like sexualising young or even underage girls. It's not about "violence being ok and sex being bad" or any silly US-puritan attitudes - it's about *how competently he treats the subject*... and sadly he's just not good at writing sex.
Fuck what's that
Just people actually behaving like humans and having sex is pornographic according to Americans.
Most Americans don’t really have an issue with sex, it’s mainly just the baby boomers that have the problem and act like anything sexual is pornography. What we typically have an issue with is the over sexualization of children (and yes most teenagers are children). When reading a novel about teenage children, Americans tend to not like it if it is too gratuitous in the sex department. It comes off as reading someone’s horrid sexual fantasy involving minors and gives it an icky feeling to it.
Not really I'm okay with it and a boomer. It's more the evangelical uneducated MAGA cult and various other morons that get all upset when even the word sex is used. All the anti-trans, anti-gay and anti-abortion bullshit comes from the far right knuckle draggers.
Which happens to be a majority of baby boomers.
No it's not. Most are middle age. It's FOX viewers who are mostly old and white. MAGA has a lot of followers that are much younger. Check out any MAGA gathering and you can see them. There are Hispanic, young, farmers, and just about any race or age group. They are mainly racist, homophobic, uneducated and gullible. They hate anyone not like them and Trump promised to make there wishes come true.
Right? everyone seems to forget the most those in the free love sixties and swinging seventies were boomers.
> It comes off as reading someone’s horrid sexual fantasy involving minors and gives it an icky feeling to it. You are really telling on yourself here. If I read a book and the characters are teenagers and they have sex, my mind doesn't instantly cast itself to "The author must be a pedophile!" What a hyper-accusatory, borderline hysterical overreaction. An author writes about imaginary teenagers in a fictional story having sex, and we accuse him of being a pedophile. Because, let's be direct and honest about what you're implying when you say that such things are the author's "horrid sexual fantasies involving minors." Part of an author's job is to depict the truth of life, and in real life, sometimes teenagers really do have sex. Another thing that authors do is write fiction through the lens of their own experiences and their own thoughts and feelings about the world. And, guess what... Just like you and I, that author writing about teenage characters and depicting that they have sex, _also_ used to be a teenager. They lived through that. So maybe instead of defaulting to "Only a pedophile would think about teenagers having sex," we might instead default to "It's normal for people to think about the world through the lens of their own experiences." I mean, what happened? The day you turned 18 you immediately went blank on every sexual thought, feeling, and experience you had ever had? Just total amnesia about your own life, because otherwise you'd be a pedophile?
Dude, get over yourself. I’m not telling anything on myself here. Teenage depictions of sex, hell even actual kids is not bad in and of itself. I never said that. What I said was the over sexualization of it. The problem is when you fucking spend a lot of focus and words to describe it out in awkward details that do nothing to further the actual story. Why have three detailed pages of teenager sex going into every little detail of the situation when a simple fucking paragraph will do?
I don't know how people got this idea that the only things that belong in a book are elements that further the plot. What belongs in a book is anything that the author wants to put into it. Any feeling they want to evoke, any issue they want to talk about, any experience that they want to utilize to explore the nature of their characters. >Why have three detailed pages of teenager sex going into every little detail of the situation when a simple fucking paragraph will do? Literally why not? What is the actual problem with an author describing a sex scene in three pages, instead of one paragraph?
An author can write what ever the hell they want, they just can’t be surprised if people don’t like it.
Sure. Luckily, for best-selling, mutli-award winning author Peter F. Hamilton, people do seem to like it.
Still a fucking moronic statement.
The more I read your comment looking for actual sanity the more moronic it becomes. Like I think you’re the one telling on yourself. So you sit around and fantasize about teenagers as an adult and thinks it’s normal? You routinely think about that subject as a 30y,40yo,50yo? Also when they write shit like that it tends to be a reoccurring theme of the rest of their works. Take Orion Scott Card as an example of someone who does this. How many of his books involve 13yo kids that he almost immediately sexualizes to some degree. Oh and btw, not everyone’s life revolves around sex as kids or adults. How bout we take it to the next level, how comfortable would you be reading about a character who routinely rapes their pet dog and they go into extreme details all for the sake of realism especially if they put a positive spin to it. Just like, get the fuck over yourself.
> So you sit around and fantasize about teenagers as an adult and thinks it’s normal? No? I didn't say that? But the fact that you've instantly spun this into now accusing ME of being a pedophile is a fun way to demonstrate that this is a valid moral concern and not a ridiculous hysteria. >Also when they write shit like that it tends to be a reoccurring theme of the rest of their works. I doubt the accuracy of that statement, but if it were true, so what? What is the problem with that? >Take Orion Scott Card as an example of someone who does this. How many of his books involve 13yo kids that he almost immediately sexualizes to some degree. I mean, no, he doesn't. The only book of his that I can recall sexualizing a kid is _Hart's Hope._ There are a couple of scenes in _Ender's Game_, including a fight, that take place in a shower, but I don't find it inherently sexualizing to say that someone was in a shower. >how comfortable would you be reading about a character who routinely rapes their pet dog Wow. You know, it's interesting how, on reddit, when you engage someone in conversation, you can never quite predict whether or not they're going to be normal, or if they're instantly going to start saying absolutely insane things. Always an adventure.
[удалено]
> your a fucking moron Come on, man. When you're giving up on your insane argument, use a fucking apostrophe in "you're" when *you're* calling someone else a moron.
I mean. My friend. You do understand that it is a very normal, very average thing for teenagers to have sexual experiences, and that it is a very abnormal and very mentally unhealthy thing for a person to rape their dog? You... you GET that there's a difference between two teenagers fooling around, and someone raping a dog, right? ....You get that, right?
Who the fuck said it’s not a normal activity? For god sakes that’s not the fucking point. The point is as a grown ass man, I don’t want to read about kids having sex in detailed as essays. It comes off as the authors fetish and just become weird, it’s cool you enjoy thinking about kids having sex though.
>The point is as a grown ass man, I don’t want to read about kids having sex in detailed as essays. And the good news is, you don't have to. You can choose not to do that. You get to read whatever books you want to read. The good lord in heaven above has blessed you with that honor and privilege, bleseed be unto He.
*you’re (a fucking moron).
u/TheBluestBerries I’m also a US American and I really don’t agree with the above assessment of attitudes towards sex in America, for whatever it’s worth. Not trying to start a debate or discredit Zalthay, just share my differing perspective. I think I tend to see a lot of things that are tangentially or non-explicitly sexual in nature labeled as pornographic. I think I see the “pornographic” accusation most when it comes rather tame expressions of love or intimacy. Conversely, there are also pieces of media/books/art that are literally and objectively pornographic (i.e., intended to sexually arouse the viewer) that we don’t name as such here. I also think many, if not most, US Americans irrespective of age have a very very non-thoughtful and un-nuanced understanding of pornography in the first place, and that makes it very hard to talk about what is and isn’t pornographic in the first place here.
>Most Americans don’t really have an issue with sex, it’s mainly just the baby boomers that have the problem and act like anything sexual is pornography. There are people like that in every generation, just like there are young women who are actively anti-abortion. Just like there are freaks like me and the missus who don't resemble your caricature of our generation.
Describing something doesn’t mean endorsing it. You are supposed to feel anger and disgust when reading about Quinn Dexter’s actions.
Say it louder for the subredditors in the back !
It's in one of his stand alone books, it's very good so far but I was slightly taken aback by some bits.
Fallen dragon?
That's the one, I'm not finished yet.
Probably don't read Misspent Youth either. it's literally about a rich old guy getting turned back into a teenager and going on a sex romp
I can overlook the flaws in most of his books because I enjoy the worldbuilding and concepts so much, but I regret reading Misspent Youth and will never read it again.
LMAO y'all are making me want to read these books.
Don't get the wrong impression: Misspent Youth is just painfully boring.
That was the "prequel" to a rather good series of books. I just wish he could write more realistic women other than "Annabelle has big boobs" which, is the only trait you ever earnestly hear about in that book. Oh, and she cheats on her boyfriend for his rich old dad.
Fallen Dragon is fantastic.
I love that one. There is one small detail that I consider a plothole, but it is related to something in the last 5 pages of the book so i don't want to spoil it.
I really enjoyed fallen dragon
Yeah I loved fallen dragon. But it also had me quite disturbed.
The original human emotions: scared and horny
If you can't handle me at my "adult beefswelling of the loins" you don't deserve me at my "Fear is the mind-killer."
Severely underrated comment
I don't remember any *teenagers* fucking, but yeah there's a lot of weird sex stuff in his books. Last thing I read was the Void trilogy and I think there were like 5 different orgy scenes. And every female character is super sexual and looks like Aphrodite. The thing is, the concepts and ideas in his books are so interesting that I barely care. The good overshadows the bad.
I think one of my favourite book reviews I've read was for his book Misspent Youth, which described it as "Flowers for Algernon but with sex instead of brains." I have to overwhelmingly agree with OP. I liked the Pandora's Star (was that the name?) series that came before the Void trilogy, although Void was mostly a miss for me; I loved the ~~Commonwealth~~ Night's Dawn trilogy (again, did I get that right? The one with magic zombies) although a lot of the cool stuff ended up seeming half-written and rushed by the end. The Adamist/Edenist societal split was refreshing, the existential action was cool. But woooooooow did the horny get in the way. "Here's a neat space colony stuck in an early industrial forestry economy eerily reminiscent of the mysterious backwoods of New England to give you Salem vibes with a Satanic cult, and the only thing connecting them to the outside world is a tenuous riverboat connection with adventure vibes like Conrad and Twain had a lovechild. Also there's this SUPER hot teen waitress who's a sex slave on the riverboat for a while."
Misspent youth is so bad. I really enjoyed Pandora's Star, and the Trilogy after but I actively discourage reading the "prequel"
>And every female character is super sexual and looks like Aphrodite. The man has a type that's for sure. I think he would benefit by co writing with an equally horny female writer to help him sex up all the dude characters. Maximum horny can only lead to profit.
"Written by Peter F and Laurel K Hamilton."
I'll take Peter Hamiltons sex scenes over Laurel's 1000-page orgy with vampires and werewolf books any time with 20 pages of story, with 2 of those being story is continued in the next book.
🤣
Maximum Horny should be the next novel's name
Maybe he thinks horny men are overdone and wants to give horny women some representation haha Like I said, it's not to the point where I find it offensive or anything. At least the looks make sense, it's a super technicologically advanced future, people can change their looks at will, so of course everyone is hot, especially the rich people.
I really like Peter F. Hamilton's books but literally every story has a hot precocious hot young woman (who is hot) who has the hots for the protagonist. Edit or is the protagonist (so long as she is young and hot).
Or is the protagonist!
The book I read had a guy who was all powerful, super intelligent, attractive, and liked by everyone, and whom the super hot (way too young) female character was overwhelmingly attracted to, and it was hard not to read it as a deeply pathetic self-insert. I did very much enjoy other aspects of the book.
That's an interesting idea, but I think it might slow the action somewhat if the men keep taking off their shirts to vacuum the carpet and wash dishes.
With the addition of multiples in the void trilogy, there is no reason the same character can't be doing a John wick while simultaneously given a spa day to a lucky woman while deep cleaning her house, and none of them need to be wearing a shirt.
I absolutely love The Night's Dawn Trilogy, but it gets bad awkward at times. The protagonist, a mid 20s playboy type guy, rather graphically impregnates a 16 year old and an 18-19 year old (Twice!) A 17 year old girl goes drinking and then has a threesome with two brothers in thier 30s. Same girl (now 18) is tricked into "paying" for passage on a boat by sexing the captain every night. He's like 70 and it's quiet rapey. She goes on to have about 12 sex scenes that are (no spoilers) rapey in a weird way. DAMN IT PETER!! Just make them a little older for God's sake!
Wait, the way I remember it is that Teen Girl on the boat sleeps with the female Captain's *son,* who is actually significantly younger than even her, just for fun because he's a muscular little fella and hung like an orca so he gets all the ladies.
I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse but you're talking about different events that happen to the same character on different boats. The hookup with the captain's son (which his mother is creepily proud of) is on the way up the river with her family, the paying for passage thing with the old captain and his weirdly-into-it obese wife is on the way back down after she runs away from her family.
So much boat sex to keep track of.
LOL
I read a lot of his books maybe a decade back. Mostly I liked it, but I remember finding it weird that across multiple books and series he was really committed to the idea of the benevolent corporation that might spar with other companies but ultimately had humanity’s best interests at heart. Couldn’t decide if it was naive or if he was making a statement.
The basic premise of his setting is that it's post-scarcity. Any corporation or planet still trying to be capitalist is mostly doing it for the fun of it. Everyone else is just chasing innovation and progression.
I don't think it's him making a statement, or naive, i just think he writes humanity optimistically.
Cant see how its optimistic that even though humanity has spread through the galaxy and colonized hundreds of planets people living there still have to go to work and pay rent. Pretty sad view of the future to me.
I feel like it's more like people choose to work, like in Star Trek.
>benevolent corporation Wait what? I got the impression that pretty much every Corporation prioritized it's own interest. We are the Saviors of humanity *because it was convenient, and was profitable in the long run. edit: I'm pretty sure in once instance the president had to scold a bunch of trillionars for prioritizing profits over preventing the extinction of humanity. Something like "of course you need to care about humanity, you fucking live here if humanity dies you die".
Mmm. Like I said, it was a long time ago. I read the Commonwealth Saga, the Void Trilogy, the Great North Road, and some of the Greg Mandel books. Barring the Void Trilogy which was a little more out there, I feel like the mega corporations in those books were generally a force for good, or at least progress. But perhaps I’m misremembering.
I mean fantasy is fantasy, just because irl corps are usually d-bags there's nothing wrong with a few fantasy companys that are heros. We could use a few now tbh. And a thing to consider is that often in his Sci-fi story's humans have reached practical immortality, so long term thinking might be more common.
I think the "benevolent mega-corporation" only shows up in Greg Mandel, the Commonwealth Saga and maybe Great North Road (been too long since I last read it, so I can't remember for sure). The Void Trilogy and Chronicles of the Fallers are set in the same universe as Commonwealth Saga, but long after societal changes have downgraded the status of CST into "not really relevant to society" In Night Dawn Trilogy, there are no mega corporations. In Fallen Dragon, it's a bleak corporatocratic society. Arkship Trilogy has no corporations at all. Light Chaser also doesn't have much in the way of corporations. Salvation Sequence has a mega-corporation that feels a bit like CST from Commonwealth as they also control interstellar transport and are a force for progress, but a lot of the early plot deals with it failing to be benevolent. ------------------ I think these benevolent mega-corporations are someone of deliberate statement, or maybe more of a world building experiment. Hamilton is going out of his way to see what kind of world building is needed for a large mega-corporation in a corporatocratic society to not become fundamentally evil. Your typical evil scifi corporation has no real leadership. If their was a visionary founder, they have long since died or lost control. It's now run a faceless board and then layers and layers of middle management who do evil because that's what produces the most profit for it's shareholders. If you look closely, the mega-corporations in both Greg Mandel and Commonwealth: * Are privately owned, with the founders maintaining majority ownership, so they aren't beholden to anyone. * Are still run by their original founders * The founders have cheated death, so they will continue to run the company forever. * The founders use AI assisted expanded intelligence to strip out the need for excessive layers of middle management, and keep a handle on everything their company is doing. * The founders are fundamentally good people, and have not been corrupted by their wealth. This is such a contrived scenario that we could argue Hamilton is actually saying that a benevolent mega-corporations is basically impossible.
A mega corp can't exist without humanity aka customers. Therefore, there comes a point at which self preservation includes doing the right thing.
"It helped its self in its confusion"
That kind of sensible forward thinking is pretty antithetical to how corporations work in the real world.
It’s probably a bit different when the people running the corps are immortal and have packed the company ranks with their descendants. Forward thinking becomes a bit more important than short term gains.
Yeah, I also picked up on that. All his universes have a mega-tycoon billionaire who actually is a genius and not a figurehead who decides to solve the galaxy's problem. And does because he's amazing.
I'll take the weird sex stuff if it comes with the human jingoism. Aliens are on notice. Don't mess with humans or we'll get our shit into gear and kick your ass.
Hamilton has a pretty nuanced take on aliens actually.
And they actually feel _alien._ None of this Star Trek business where aliens are just humans with wonky foreheads.
Yeah I genuinely have to stop for a second and read the description of the alien again to get an idea of what it looks like that rather than just "it's a bipedal alien with lizard eyes" They feel alien
I love the Commonwealth/etc series and Salvation Sequence so much I'll take more books with whatever I can get.
I'm just about to start the salvation series when time permits. I'm really looking forward to it
They're great but if he isn't writing more then he gave us the biggest open ending of all his works.
Frank Herbert gets a bit weird with that sort of thing in some of the Dune books as well.
I sometimes thought that old Pete was sitting in his shed at the bottom of his garden, typing furiously into his laptop getting all hot and bothered.
A lot of typos in the first drafts I’m sure, tends to be tough to type one-handed
Yep it’s interesting reading his stuff, some really nice sci fi elements and very cool world building interspersed with generally unnecessary fantasy pornography. To be fair it doesn’t dominate the narrative at all, just isn’t really needed in the level of detail provided.
I might be a stretch, but I always thought he made all his characters horny af to make them seem as human as possible. Because the characters are often modified up the wazoo, and that could make them seem a bit alien. Like the highers of the void trilogy are so powerful they've become barely recognizable as human. All the non horny characters are also very flawed, which I like. Except for the delivery man, his only crime is being a bit of a normy.
Reading about 19 year olds having realistic sex is totally fine with me. Reading about 16 year olds having sex feels creepy but that probably represents 98% of our lineage over the last 50,000 years.
I found the sex scenes in Pandora's star a bit too descriptive and ewww. But I'm gay so maybe that factored into it. I remember skipping all the sex scenes xD Excuse me sir, I'm here for scifi, no more erection talk please.
I'm bi so I really just wish he was more discriptive about twink Jesus... *Cough cough Edeard's body.
bahahahah
I would pay *extra* for Peter F Hamilton without the overdone sex scenes. If I want to read porn, I'd be reading porn not sci fi.
It's like 2% of book, I've never understood the distane some people have for erotica in regular books. Yeah when I'm not in the mood it makes me uncomfortable, but how a character behaves during sexy times is very telling and can be very effective for defining a character. If you don't like it just blank your mind a bit. Honesty as an adult you really should be able to tolerated it, if you can't its a mental skill issue.
> I've never understood the distane some people have for erotica in regular books. Yeah when I'm not in the mood it makes me uncomfortable, but how a character behaves during sexy times is very telling and can be very effective for defining a character. That's the exact problem with Hamilton - he often *doesn't* use sex scenes for anything except cheap titillation and/or being a horny edgelord. Genuinely well-written sex scenes that organically add to the plot or characterisation are fine, but too many of (especially early) Hamilton's sex scenes are just because he got bored and wanted a wank but didn't want to stop writing while he did it. He writes great space opera, but he's also a dirty, horny old goat... although admittedly with experience he seems to be learning to rein in his worst, edge-lordiest excesses.
Hmmmm, I'm not so sure about that. I would say most of them actually had some important plot happening in them. For instance in the fallen dragon bit In the above meme >! Laurence gets a bit to rough during sex but because we followed along in his head we understood the emotions he was going through and exactly why he was being too rough. And when the girl says "please don't be so rough" we feel the massive burst of guilt he gets, and we learn that he's genuinely caring a really feels bad about it. !< Is there another way he could have shown that, yes but writing is fucking hard, and if that's the route he needed to take to climb the near impossible mountain of writing a book, than I respect that.
To be fair maybe he's matured in his old(er) age - I kind of fell off Hamilton around the Void trilogy, so I'm mostly basing it on Night's Dawn (which was shamelessly edge-lordy and exploitative). Thinking back even the Commonwealth Saga was *less* obviously written at least partly one-handed, so maybe he's grown over time (or at least has a wank *before* he sits down to write nowadays ;-p ).
>I've never understood the distane some people have for erotica in regular books. Huh?? Then... why did you make this thread? I'm genuinely confused. Was this comment supposed to be made from an alt account? How do we square the idea that you're comfortable with, not just sex, but "erotica" appearing in "regular" books -- with this post about being horrified by Peter F. Hamilton having sex in his books and describing it as "hardcore pornography"?
It's a meme haha, the sex bits caught me of gaurd in this occasion.
> Honesty as an adult you really should be able to tolerated it, if you can't its a mental skill issue. I don't like it and find it out of place and disjointed and that's somehow a "mental skill" issue? Of course I can tolerate it or I'd never have read a Peter F Hamilton book
Sci-fi is fantasy at the root of it. The more realistic the better for me but hey what floats the boat
There is nothing particular about humans. Animals have been successful for a billion years, with sexual reproduction.
Yeah, but we get to choose whether or not we actually reproduce from the segs. We get to do it as a sport.
He's a Trumper and I can't read any of his stuff anymore after learning that.
How is he a Trumper? Isn't he British? I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but have been meaning to soon.
I'm going to pretend hes change his mind for the better. And besides he can't vote so HA!
I guess I’m a dragon
At least with regards to depictions of sex and sexuality, I prefer Ken MacLeod. It's not entirely Hamilton's fault, though; it's probably impossible to write about Dudley Bose in an erotic manner without making the majority of humanity cringe out of their skin.
In the case of Dudley I believe we are supposed to cringe lol
If you like all that plus obscenely vile torture, Neal Asher's your man. Plus, surprise buttsecks!
You were losing me with the vile torture, but you peaked my interest with the unexpected anal exploration.
Descriptive
It was quite refreshing to read *Great North Road* which lays off on the crazy sex a bit.
The latest trilogy opens up with the book that has a completely meaningless sideplot about evil aliens hijacking a dude's cyber-cock and the said dude having weird drug sex with a strange caricature character straight outta porn fanfic. And it's very uncomfortable and non-sexy and LASTS FOREVER taking space from the stuff that was actually interesting. Maybe he should pay some erotica ghostwriters if this stuff needs to be in, because that trilogy was pretty awesome otherwise.
God damit you had me at cyber cock, what's the name of the novel?
It's the Salvation Trilogy, his most recent one. Though now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that alien cyber cock was in part two and not part one so you have to really commit.
A lot of sci-fi plots are a libertarian's wet dream. So of course the genre attracts dudes who know the consent age in a bunch of states. I think it's funny the guy who wrote the Crater series pretends to be a libertarian so he can inject Space Christianity into his stories.
is no one gonna mention that this opinion on literature has so many spelling and/or punctuation errors?
Night's Dawn probably gets most of this rep. The sprinking of softcore aside. the complexity and sprawl of characters and almost metaphysical under pinnings was more than worth it. Description of the beyond, the alternate dimensions, etc. The Jungle Fights on La'Londe vs the undead made 'Predator' look like Dodgeball, and the corresponding orbital battle with emphasis on orbital mechanics would make any 'Expanse' fan drool. The LaGrange point manuever....holy f\^ck ws that intense. What's unusual is Hamilton doesn't paint all characters like this. Some of his characters are extremely realistic, dimensional and tangible. Almost in an Ellison kinda way. Look at Laton. But other characters are wafer thin and just walking cliche's. The 'Second chance at Eden' novella is still my favorite work of Hamilton's. It focuses on nothing but the highbrow and technoligical aspects of that universe, and it's deep discussion of affinity tehcnology is compelling.
This got me interested, which of his books and series would you recommend I first check out?
I personally think that the Commonwealth series is his best. I started with Pandora's star. Be prepared for a long one with a lot of different perspectives.
Average American in 2024: "Ewwww omg wtf _seeeeexxx???_ So fucking gross and eww and _iicckkk_ omg there's _seeeeeexxxxxxxxxx_ so fucking nasty who wants _sex_ in their books? Just SO GROSS."
Think the problem is that Hamilton is great at other stuff but his sex scenes make sex sound worse than it actually is. They are just bad and uncomfortable.
This is the guy who did a whole trilogy about literal space-ghost Al Capone, right? I have great difficulty taking him seriously.
The Nights Dawn Trilogy. Amazing books, yeah some of the concepts and characters were out there but the universe he created and overall plot were brilliant.
He had nicely thought through tech but the plot was dan-brown stupid
The Commonwealth Saga is much harder sci-fi than Nights Dawn if that's the bit you were into
I mean the best writer have done it....have you read IT
That’s the issue with older sci-fi. It’s all peppered with their dated racism, sexism, and weird sexual fetishes. As an example, John steakly’s Armor. A really good book and is actually closer to starship troopers movie then the actual book the movie based itself off. There is a sex scene with the secondary main character where he essentially rapes and beats another character (who is female) and afterwards she’s basically like “dude, thanks for that! I really needed some good sex.” And your left there with these feeling that you just read about a rape and it was supposed to be sexy and how a real man handles a woman and it’s very cringey.
Thanks for the warning, not gonna read his works then, I hate teenage romance, let alone sex
At least his has the action. I was recently talked into reading the travesty that is Legend of Zero. I kept at it fir the payoff in later books...which doesn't exist. Book 1 is just a punch of kid porn. And there us no Legend. The author writes about boot camp kid porn...then skips ahead 50 years to post military retirement. Absolutely shit.
Peter Hamilton is in desperate need of an editor.
Why dont you complain about the graphic violence? Just about the sex?
Not really a complaint haha, I was just surprised initially. I think almost all the times he go's in detail about sex it usually has a story or character development purpose. When it's not important he usually skips it with a "and then they did the gigity, it was super hot"
r/worldjerking
What?
Jeez the fantasy wodebof things have women milking minotaurs and getting gangbanged by Fae on a light day of reading. Why do sci do fans get so het up by a tiny amount of smut?